Catholics celebrate faith's arrival in the Americas

Many members of Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Hendersonville will spend a long day Sunday celebrating Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of the American continents.

By Amy B. McCrawTimes-News Correspondent

Many members of Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Hendersonville will spend a long day Sunday celebrating Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of the American continents.“It’s a full day and a lot of fun,” said Father Robert Williams, a parochial vicar at Immaculate Conception. “This is a tradition that goes back almost 500 years.”Our Lady of Guadalupe celebrates the events surrounding the beginning of the spread of Catholicism in the Americas.Those events began when an apparition of the Virgin Mary appeared to a poor Aztec Indian named Juan Diego in the Tepayac hill country near central Mexico in December 1531.Diego reported the apparition to a nearby bishop. But the bishop at first did not pay much attention to Diego. The apparition appeared to Diego two more times over the next few days. But it wasn’t until Dec. 12 that the bishop accepted the truth of Diego’s message.On Dec. 12, the apparition appeared to Diego and told him to gather roses on a barren hill. The apparition arranged the roses in his cloak and told him to see the bishop again. When Diego opened his cloak to the bishop, the bishop saw painted on it a beautiful image of the Virgin exactly as she had appeared to Diego.The bishop then believed Diego’s account of the apparition and built a shrine in honor of her. The basilica is now the most important shrine honoring the Virgin Mary in all the American continents.Immaculate Conception marked the anniversary on Thursday with a special service.The church will continue its celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Sunday at 5 a.m. with special music that will include a mariachi band.“The church is pretty packed for that,” Williams said.

Church members will continue the celebration at 11:30 a.m. when they will lead a procession from Jackson Park back to the church. The procession will include some members carrying a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe.Once the procession arrives back at the church, a Mass will be held in Spanish, and members will put on a play that demonstrates the appearance of the apparition to Juan Diego. The service will also include traditional Aztec dancing.After the service, a reception will be held at the church with food and more dancing.“This is a culture that uses dance for just about everything,” Williams said.About 1,500 to 1,700 people usually attend the Our Lady of Guadalupe celebration at Immaculate Conception each year, while the church only has room for about 900 people.“People are standing everywhere,” Williams said.The Our Lady of Guadalupe anniversary is an important event to many Catholic worshippers in Mexico because it marks the beginning of the church in the Americas. The celebration at Immaculate Conception is well attended each year because many of the church’s Hispanic members want to continue to remember the important day, Williams said.“With the apparition came so much conversion and Christianizing of the Americas,” he said.For more information about the service, visit the church website at www.immaculateconceptionchurch.com.